Category: Diary

Friday was the first day of home ownership and it was a busy day. Rae was out at the house at 7:30 for the first of the tradies. Over the course of the day the plumbers connected the hot water and stove top, the sparkies connected the oven and the, um, lockies fitted deadlocks. Tim dropped by to give a quote on curtains too so it was a full day for her.

But not quite as full as it could have been. The guy who had been subcontracted by our floorer to install the laminate floor just didn’t turn up. He also wasn’t answering phone calls. The floor people weren’t that great, they didn’t return any of my phone calls and I was on my way to stage a sit in when Rae finally got the message, around 1:00pm, that he wasn’t coming.

Thankfully they could arrange a replacement and I’m sitting here on Saturday while Sean (or it may be Shaun) and his cousin Peter are listening to Gold 104 while they lay our floor. Poor Sean, so far this morning the pallet of laminate has broken his van’s door, he’s sliced his thumb open and been stuck with the most difficult sort of laminate to lay (I have no idea either). All this for doing a favour for our supplier. The floor that’s down looks fantastic though.

I can’t describe how happy I feel right now.

We, my lovely wife and I, own our own home. 14 months ago we bought a block of land in an empty street. Now it’s home to us and many others. We picked up the keys at 2:00 this afternoon. We went straight to the house and the two of us wandered around drinking champagne and eating white chocolate to celebrate. We’ll take the kids tomorrow but just for that moment it was wonderful to have the two of us. In our own home. Ours!

 

Seriously, what’s the point in having a web site and phone number if you’re not answering the phone or replying to emails?

I’ve tried three separate locksmiths this morning; none have responded to an email and all went through to a message bank. After the third I gave up I went over to Service Central. If someone wants our money then they can call us.

Looks like we may be able to move on Saturday, December 27 now, that’s just two weeks to get this place packed up so it’s all hands on deck until then. If you want to burn off Christmas lunch and get ready for new years the plea for assistance still stands.

Looks like divorce is on the way, and it’s all Jen’s fault.

This afternoon Jen sent me a link to real time tracking of flights arriving and departing from Melbourne international airport. I haven’t left the computer screen since. I’ve suggested to my beloved that we could get a dedicated PC and a nice new 26” monitor just to have this going 24 hours a day and we could have a second monitor running in the bedroom too.

Boy, did the kids learn a few new words…

Okay, anybody up for a little exercise? Most specifically on January 4th 2009, ‘cause that’s the day we’ll be moving. Hopefully it will be the last time for a very long time that we ever call upon the help of friends to lug our stuff to a new suburb.

We did our final inspection today and, save for a few minor bits and pieces that need attention, our house is complete. We will hopefully collect the keys late next week so we can have time do other things that need to be done before the move. We’ve already got a new PO Box, our new phone number and have booked in the carpet layer. The to do list is still incredibly long and our bank balance is shrinking by the hour but it’s so worth it now we know when the house will be ours.

So, if you’re not doing anything on Sunday the 4th and want to earn some pizza, beer and undying gratitude just let us know.

I was listening to 6 Music yesterday and My Mate Chris played some old school hip hop. Normally I’d just ignore a song like this, hip hop ain’t my thing, but one lyric jumped out, “you won’t find me on AltaVista”. This, of course got me thinking about search engines of old.

Back in the Netscape Navigator 2 days I started off with the Yahoo directory. Then, when the net began to grow I made the move to AltaVista and stayed there for a couple of years. You could generally find what you were looking for in the first couple of pages and it didn’t take too many weeks, or months, to update their index. I flirted with Lycos and Excite too, Rae even has an excite.com.au t-shirt that she uses as a sleeping t-shirt to this day, just one of the reasons I married her.

Then about midway through ‘99 I heard about this new search engine Gogle, or oogle, or Google or something like that. It was simple, quick and provided what I needed straight up every time. I don’t think I’ve seriously used another search engine since.

I now use Google products for search, email, documents, monitoring web sites, maps, news, calendars, chatting, taking notes, translating, as a global clock, converting currencies, earning money, working with digital cameras, hosting video, keeping lists and hopefully next year they will be powering my phone. I wonder what it would take for some other company to wrestle all these things away?

No sleep, screaming non-sleeping kids, flaky net connection, work slipping towards overdue, a keyboard and mouse that seem to be operating on a five second delay and a dodgy eye. There are some days where the only thing that gets you through is a good home made shot of web developer fuel.

Oh no, Bert has learned The Word. It’s slowly driving me mad, every second word seems to be The Word. I’ve no idea where it came from, but for the last couple of days all I’ve heard is “Why?”. “But why Dadda?”. “Why is that Dadda?”. “Dadda, why?”.

This morning we’ve covered why we wipe his bottom, why the babies are having a nap, why we won’t be playing in the rain, why we have to turn the television off after Play School, why we are sticking the paper to the cardboard, why we have to press down on the glue, why we put the stickers there, why the dish and the spoon aren’t on the paper, why we we are having sausage rolls for lunch, why mumma is at work, why we have a shower, why mumma and dadda had an unintended sleep in, why dadda needs a coffee, why you shouldn’t pick your nose, why it smells like coffee outside, why we hung the clothes out and about a million other things I’ve since forgotten.

I always hoped I’d have a curious, inquisitive and knowledge seeking son. Just goes to show that you should be careful what you pray for…